Experts,
When a spell/art has a "DOT" effect on it, is the total damage inflicted by the DOT always the same as the first cycle?
For instance, I have a spell that instantly DD's my foe for 10 damage, but will then inflict between 2-8 disease damage every 4 seconds for 12 seconds.
So the 10DD is inflicted on cast.
The DOT component now kicks in and a random is rolled between 2-8 to determine my DOT damage. Let's say it's a 5.
Now, for 12 seconds, every 4 seconds, does the DOT do specifically 5 disease damage? Or does the random happen each cycle and a new DOT damage is inflicted?
Make sense? Thanks in advance.

The random amount occurs each tick and does not have to be the same amount as the previous tick.

On live, I'm almost positive the tick random value is calculated only once. Because I know for a fact if I'm healing someone with a DOT heal and it crits, it will crit every tick. If it doesn't crit, it won't ever crit on following ticks.

All my live characters are such lowbies, it's hard to determine which is correct due to my tick/proc/dot stuff always being like 1 or 2 anyway heh. Hopefully others will chime in on this, but for now I will go with DOT as LE says, and HOT as Scat says, and somewhere we'll figure it out.

I just tested DoT's on my 75 necro, cause I never really paid attention, and they are indeed random on each tick. Will test the other stuff later when I have more time if you still need it.

Thank you, Jabantiz. I think that sums it up, unless anyone thinks different DOTs behave differently?

Jab is correct. Prior to TSO, the damage was fixed for each tick, but that was a bug. It now functions as the developers wanted, a random amount each tick. As part of that fix they also made it so crits are always max base damage + random crit amount, instead of the old way of medium base about + larger random crit amount (which resulted in crits doing less than max damage 50% of the time).

Ah, I haven't played since TSO came out so that's why I could've sworn it was a fixed amount.